From stealth blackout to whitelisting: Inside the Iranian shutdown
kentik.com
kentik.com
Good luck! i hope you will soon be able to call your congressman
https://archive.ph/2026.01.22-082913/https://www.aljazeera.c...
Another emerging country to watch out for is India. Sliding democracy by suppressing any form for free speech in main stream media and overwhelming propaganda on social media that drowns genuine critics is very chilling.
I said "we" as in the people not the government
You'd think that, after the last decade, people would've learned that demonizing and ostracizing your political opposition is not a great way to get them to join your side.
Why do you think I'm wrong?
Hearing about this and calls about imminent genocide from the last 10 years. India never had free speech. There is plenty of propaganda on the other side too. YouTube is full of anti-govt. propagandists.
There was even some reporting from Tiananmen Square in 1989, and from Baghdad in 1991.
News media has ceased to be a meaningful investigative endeavor.
These days, I think the business model is selling influence rather than selling subscriptions and generic ads.
The Iranian government then used Chinese tech to block Starlink, shutdown the external internet and the violence stopped.
Do you have evidence of this? At least in the USA, mobs angry at the government will conduct arson and property destruction without being paid a dime.
Here is an excellent podcast from a Washington post journalist that was captured and held as a hostage - it’s called 544 days (that’s the amount of time he was jailed there)
As of late, we’ve seen a few measures like the restoration of transit from Rostelecom and the return of routes originated by IPM, as the country appears to be moving towards a partial restoration. At the time of this writing, the plan appears to be to operate the Iranian internet as a whitelisted network indefinitely.
I’d call that digital apartheid.
Picture of Tehran (hybrid warfare)
https://archive.ph/2026.01.21-041206/https://www.aljazeera.c...
https://eh4s.eu/publication/sino-russo-iranian-tech-cooperat...
>> Like in Europe then. :o)
"It's to protect the children"
This is simply turning down methods of communications to reduce protestors ability to coordinate and enable mass killings
I still stand by the term. Apartheid literally means "apartness". Even though the segregation in this case is not on a racial basis they still classify their population into two major blocks. Some have full rights, others have none.
And even when the blackout was not present, my friend had to used some complex V2Ray server (in Iran) to another server (in Germany) to connect and it was shared by other people, so if he cannot connect probably 99% of other people in his area cannot also connect outside.
Iran has a surprisingly robust domestic ecosystem of hyperscalers [1] and telco infra [6][7] built out over the past decade with limited outside involvement and a severe sanctions regime, and have even started exporting Iranian IT services to Uganda [2], Kenya [3], South Africa [4], Venezuela [5], Russia [9], and China [9]
My understanding is that during the current 5 year plan in Iran, they are trying to fully transition the Iranian internet to the NIN, as all ".ir" domains are supposed to be hosted on the NIN.
If someone wants to find a techno-authoritarian state I'd say Iran is probably closer to that vision than most other countries, as a large portion of their leadership are Western-educated (Stanford, MIT, UPMC/Paris VI, Supélec, UNSW, etc) Computer Engineers and Computer Scientists by training (eg. Iran's VP did his PhD under Thomas Cover at Stanford [8] and Rouhani's Chief of Staff studied EE@SJSU). Even Iran's NSC and former IRGC head (who's daughter is a surgeon at Emory - so much for marg bar amreeka) was a CS major turned Kantian philosophy PhD.
[0] - https://citizenlab.ca/irans-national-information-network/
[1] - https://www.arvancloud.ir/fa
[2] - https://tvbrics.com/en/news/uganda-and-iran-to-boost-ict-co-...
[3] - https://mail.techreviewafrica.com/public/news/1361/kenya-and...
[4] - https://www.samenacouncil.org/samena_daily_news?news=64545
[5] - https://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2025/08/06/752585/Iranian-fibe...
[6] - https://zmc.co.ir/
[7] - https://www.rayafiber.com/en/home
[8] - https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/1011657
[9] - https://www.kharon.com/brief/iran-sanctions-maximum-pressure...
Assuming Iran didn't follow the path that it did, Iran would have also ended up becoming a tech hub like Israel became today.
But this recognition should not be used to glaze a regime that has officially admitted to killing at least 5,000 protestors [0] in just 2 weeks and in reality killed significantly more people than that.
Being adept at understanding the applications of technology doesn't make one a humanist.
[0] - https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/iranian-offic...
That expertise wasn’t just gonna disappear in a couple of decades.
And yes, the Iranian regime is brutal and terrible. This was one time the opposition was strong enough that they may have had a chance and yet our fellow in chief decided to launch incendiary words, which only allowed the regime to paint the opposition as western funded, while not providing any actual support (there’s a reason Israel, which is at least led by competent leadership, kept quiet about the protests in Iran because they understand how their words of support would undermine them).
https://incyber.org/en/article/iran-between-isolation-and-te...
>The Iranian Information Technology Organization (ITOI) even set precise rules to evaluate candidates based on three different standards: ISO 27017 (cloud security controls), ISO 27018 (protection of personally identifiable information), and NIST SP 900-145, which concerns the American definition of cloud computing. “They want a comprehensive offer with its three components— IaaS, SaaS, and PaaS https://incyber.org/en/article/iran-between-isolation-and-te...
China could have been like Japan per capita. Protectionism puts a big cap on economic growth potential.
"current dollar valuations are more appropriate. Nominal GDP measured in these units are plotted in Figure 2." https://econbrowser.com/archives/2009/06/how_important_i_2#:...
(What do those bumps correspond to?)
What’s the excuse for not having the same GDP per capita 80 years later?
The curve became exponential way too late. And only after they (partially) opened up.
By contrast this [2] is China's GDP/capita which is something really close to a vertical line. But for all the talk about economic systems, I think it's just because of good leadership and a motivated population. There's plenty of capitalist countries that aren't going anywhere, and there's endless examples of hybrid/social economic systems that have also gone nowhere. So I think there have to be explanations outside of the economic system itself.
[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
[2] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?location...
As for China, they would be more wealthy without the meddling of their government. There's no reason they couldn't be like Taiwan, but bigger. The Chinese people got to where they are in spite of their anchor.
They kept predicting collapse, too.
Nobody talks much about the ricardian theory of static comparative advantage today. China's rise kind of invalidated it.
America was taken by surprise by its rise because of this. The cordial relations and trade flipped almost overnight to hostility once it was realized that China's economic power now rivaled that of that of the US and was poised to grow even more.
Huge GDP/capita in certain places is because of outsized industries that don't really translate to the average person. Ireland is another example where it's nearly twice as 'rich' as the US by that same metric, but it's just a nuance of it being an international hub for tax avoidance, not because the Irish are doing especially well.
[1] - https://www.reddit.com/r/taiwan/comments/1jmhhk1/realistic_s...
This is already repeated by the Google Search AI summary, which is unfortunate since your reference (from 2012) doesn't seem to back it up.
https://citizenlab.ca/research/2025-10-ai-enabled-io-aimed-a...
Iran is not Syria, there's a lot of wily people in the leadership and they won't be rolled over so easily
So actually.. getting the nukes was the right play for them because eventually they would get sold out by China or Russia. Having nukes gets you to shake hands and send love letters to Trump. Frankly Trump sees Europeans as total cucks and has more respect for Kim Jong-un
If Iran actually had nukes, the Israeli lead bullying would immediately halt.
I should probably put an outside bet on the next country to get the Bomb being Poland, maybe by 2050. They've only just started building a civilian reactor, but weapons would make strategic sense for them.
Not sure if Trump understands that he is playing quite a dangerous game in terms of nuclear proliferation because if the US deterrent goes away, the small countries will start thinking about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swedish_nuclear_weapons_progra...
Many of you are genuinely deceived by such claims, though I can only imagine the depth of ignorance / self deceit required for that.
Others repeat them knowing they are lying, thinking to themselves that the important thing is that they themselves are not living in the midst of civil wars caused by foreign interventions, and that eventually what is robbed from the miserable prople who are living in such hell, will trickle also to ther own pockets.
But the residents of the countries you bomb, either by yourselves or using the hands of others, and even these "others", they do know what is happening..
https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/1/19/in-iran-the-us-...
It is irrelevant with regards to conversations about the Iranian NIN and is essentially a form of whataboutism.
But, wait, this is Iran ran by the revolutionary guards... What did anyone expect? Was it right to tell this people - help is on the way, when there was none?
Sorry, downvote as much as you like, but I'll reiterate - the brave Persian people will do it better next way, as they now know tis entirely up to them, no help comes. And they are super brave to do what they did, where did you exactly got wrong what I wrote??
Honestly - the weakest point is and will always be communication, once you loose it you fire in the dark. Like many other revolts, this also was heavily dependent on internet coordination, means controlled by the government.
So perhaps being able to organise is much more challenging to the status quo than having a pistol in every house. I would also argue 21st century revolutions are perhaps a little different from others before.
I can easily imagine a very massive cyber revolt where communications are brought to a standstill for the ruling elite. But while imaginable is hard to enact in practice and someone else in the comments noted many top Iranian officials had an IT or engineering backgrounds which makes them better prepared and the whole effort much more challenging.